In the next few days, Sorcerer King will go gold. That term means a lot less in the digital era since it’s just the moment that it’s 1.0 and we’re ready to say “this game is worthy of being purchased for the posted price.”

I’m both excited and nervous about reviews. In the past, our games were designed with “drive by” reviews in mind. That is, they were fairly straight forward in what they’re about. Sorcerer King, however, is not.&...

Introduction Welcome to Sorcerer King a different kind of fantasy 4X from what you’ve played before. Sorcerer King is a game where the events of a traditional fantasy 4X game have already happened: A group of rival civilizations built up empires fought wars with one of those civilizations coming to dominate the others. In this case, the winner was the Sorcerer King.

The game starts out with you and your rivals relegated to a single city under the terms of peace set by the...

What is it? It’s a fantasy strategy game with a lot of role playing elements. Or it’s an RPG with strategy elements. You be the judge:

It’s a strategy game because

You train units You found new cities You build up your cities You engage in diplomacy with rival civilizations You can terraform the map (using magic) You harvest resources You can craft weapons, armor, etc. You r...

Some people have said that Sorcerer King looks a lot like Legendary Heroes. What do you think people mean by this and what would be the most effective way to make sure the two games are visually distinct? We are debating a lot about camera rotation. The game supports it and we plan to have an option for it. The question is, what would you like to see as the default and why? We have the Magic slider in the game setup....

Another Sunday with Sorcerer King. A lot of progress was made this week.

So below are the good, the bad, and the ugly things I have to say about Sorcerer King this week. It’ll all be schmushed together.

New Sovereign: Ashlira

This weekend I mainly played with Ashlira, the Priest. Scott and I have been designing her for awhile and it’s amazing (but not surprising) how many ideas that look good on paper just don’t work out when implemented. That’s alwa...

For Sunday I spent the day doing lots of various little things. I’m not sure where to even start. One thing I can say is that we still have a long way to go. Not just in terms of bugs but just balance and feel.

The mid-game has a death-lull in it. That is, where you’re well into the game, you think you have a pretty good handle on things but there’s nothing exciting happening.

In a traditional 4X game, this is where diplomacy/world council type...

Lots of tweaks to quests to give players more intangible traits. Lot of work on the Guardian sovereign in general Guardian gets a mass sleep spell Guardian gets a mass slow spell Guardian gets an obstruct map spell (rains rocks onto the tactical map causing those tiles to slow down enemies) Guardian gets a damage reflection spell where damage is 2X back at the enemy as long as that unit i...

We cannot wait for you to get Beta 2. I always hate the first beta. They’re so painful. They’re basically a “does this work on your machine”. Very boring. Beta 2 is where the actual game starts to matter a little.

So where do things stand with Beta 2?

Beta 2 is due out this month and it’s going to be big. It’s where the Minor factions start to matter. A lot. It also starts to really show off what makes Sorcerer King unique as a strategy game.

Sorcerer King continues to get polished up. I suspect it’s the most polished game we’ve ever made as we’ve had so much extra time to work on it.

So what’s been happening?

Originally, we were going to release Sorcerer King in April. But we talked to our friends at other studios and realized that the Age of Wonders expansion and Pillars of Eternity were coming out during the same month. That’s a lot of fantasy in a short amount of time. With Galactic Civiliz...

This week Stardock will be releasing Beta 5 of Sorcerer King. The last major public beta for its upcoming fantasy strategy/RPG game.

For those of you not familiar with Sorcerer King:

You are the sovereign of a civilization in the fantasy world known as Elemental. Unfortunately, the world has been largely conquered by the malevolent Sorcerer King who is now attempting to gain godhood by destroying the magical shards in which all magic in the world id derived from. The Sorcerer Kin...

4K and 5K monitors are coming. And we think they’re going to become common much faster than most people think. That means gamers will be in a bit of a pickle. Either they’ll have to run their games at a lower resolutions (blurry, non-ideal) or face games with tiny tiny text and UIs.

Sorcerer King will be the first Stardock game to explicitly support high DPI displays. The screenshots below come from my mere 2560x1440 display but as the last screenshot shows, the supe...